'Why I a woman, or you a man, dear Lady Constantine?' 'I cannot explain. No; you must keep your fame and your science all to yourself, and I must keep my--troubles.' Swithin, to divert her from melancholy--not knowing that in the expression of her melancholy thus and now she found much

pleasure,--changed the subject by asking if they should take some

observations.

'Yes; the scenery is well hung to-night,' she said looking out upon the

heavens.

Then they proceeded to scan the sky, roving from planet to star, from

single stars to double stars, from double to coloured stars, in the

cursory manner of the merely curious. They plunged down to that at other

times invisible multitude in the back rows of the celestial theatre:

remote layers of constellations whose shapes were new and singular;

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pretty twinklers which for infinite ages had spent their beams without

calling forth from a single earthly poet a single line, or being able to

bestow a ray of comfort on a single benighted traveller.

'And to think,' said Lady Constantine, 'that the whole race of shepherds,

since the beginning of the world,--even those immortal shepherds who

watched near Bethlehem,--should have gone into their graves without

knowing that for one star that lighted them in their labours, there were

a hundred as good behind trying to do so! . . . I have a feeling for

this instrument not unlike the awe I should feel in the presence of a

great magician in whom I really believed. Its powers are so enormous,

and weird, and fantastical, that I should have a personal fear in being

with it alone. Music drew an angel down, said the poet: but what is that

to drawing down worlds!' 'I often experience a kind of fear of the sky after sitting in the

observing-chair a long time,' he answered. 'And when I walk home

afterwards I also fear it, for what I know is there, but cannot see, as

one naturally fears the presence of a vast formless something that only

reveals a very little of itself. That's partly what I meant by saying

that magnitude, which up to a certain point has grandeur, has beyond it

ghastliness.' Thus the interest of their sidereal observations led them on, till the

knowledge that scarce any other human vision was travelling within a

hundred million miles of their own gave them such a sense of the

isolation of that faculty as almost to be a sense of isolation in respect

of their whole personality, causing a shudder at its absoluteness. At

night, when human discords and harmonies are hushed, in a general sense,

for the greater part of twelve hours, there is nothing to moderate the

blow with which the infinitely great, the stellar universe, strikes down

upon the infinitely little, the mind of the beholder; and this was the

case now. Having got closer to immensity than their fellow-creatures,

they saw at once its beauty and its frightfulness. They more and more

felt the contrast between their own tiny magnitudes and those among which

they had recklessly plunged, till they were oppressed with the presence

of a vastness they could not cope with even as an idea, and which hung

about them like a nightmare.




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